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Dr. N.A. Semashko
People’s commisar of the health. Dr. Semashko is an important figure among the circle of the reformers of the everyday. He lived for a while in the Narkomfin but in 1932 he left his first wife there and moved with the new one in a stalinian building closer to the Cremlin. Before the Revolution there […]
2009-05-05
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A.A.Deineka
Among the occupants of the Narkomfin building, during the first year there was also Alexander Aleksandrovich Deineka, painter, graphic, member of the Oktober group, author among other works of the wonderful mosaics of the Majakowskaja station of the moscow metro.
2009-05-05
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Bulgakov-mosca anni ’20
Let’s establish, once and for all: home is the angular stone of a man’s life. Let’s consider this as an axiom: without a home, a man can’t even exist. Having said so, I have something to communicate to all those who live in Berlin, Paris, London, etcetera: in Moscow there are no apartments. So, how could […]
2009-05-04
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Moscow’s Avant-garde Architecture
‘Change life!’ ‘Change society!’ These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from the Soviet constructivists of 1920-30, and from their failure, is that new social relationships call for new space, and vice versa. Hernri Lefebvre, The Production of Space The Russian avant.garde of the 1920’s to […]
2009-05-04
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N.A.Milyutin
People’s Commissar for the Finance of the USSR, commissioned the Narkomfin House. It was after the revolution that Milyutin became a statesman, but architecture and painting were always the principal passion of his life. He drew all his life, even at he front during he war. In his youth, he lived in St.Petersburg and graduated […]
2009-05-03
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novosel’e
The process of moving into a new apartment, the novosel’e, exists as a distinct genre of Stalinist Socialist realist Mythology. It is endlessy retold in magazines, newspapers and movie clips. A typical move plot consists of the family of a deserving worker, usually a Stakhanovite, moving with its belongings old and new into a gleaning […]
2009-04-21
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Ugolok Diadi Lenina
In the same room of the dining table should be a corner set aside for the children: an Ugolok Diadi Lenina (Uncle’s Lenin Little Corner) where children can be instilled with love and respect for lenin. Here also should hang a picture of Lenin, and images of the old pre-Revolutionary byt of children suffering under […]
2009-04-05
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Social Condenser
”…the principal objective of constructivism… is the definition of the Social Condenser of the age…” OSA Group (Union of Contemporary Architects) conference in 1928 Moisei Ginzburg It published the journal SA (Sovremmennaia Arkhitektura or ‘Contemporary Architecture’). Da Kopp, Città e Rivoluzione,
2009-04-04
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BYT
Byt encompasses all the following English terms “daily life”, “domesticity”, “lifestyle”, “style of life”. With the revolution and the problem of constructing a new socialist society, the word byt assumed an increasingly political significance. (…) With the end of the civil war, the following period of capitalist economic recovery known as New Economic Policy (NEP), and […]
2009-03-28
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Realist Manifesto / Manifesto del Realismo
Naum Gabo Reads the Realist Manifesto first published in 1920. MANIFESTO DEL REALISMO “Come contribuisce l’arte all’attuale epoca della storia dell’uomo?” “Il mondo sconvolto dei cubisti, spezzettato dalla loro anarchia intellettule non può soddisfare chi, come noi, ha già realizzato la Rivoluzione e sta edificando un mondo nuovo” “L’attuazione delle nostre percezioni del mondo sotto forma di spazio […]
2009-03-24